A Deadly Affair at Bobtail Ridge (10 page)

In the afternoon I run back over to Bobtail to the Borland place, but it still looks deserted—no dogs, no people, and no cars. On the way out of town I drive by Vera Sandstone's house and stop when I see Jenny's car in the driveway. Jenny answers the door in jeans and an old Dallas Cowboys T-shirt. “I am so glad to see you, I could cry,” Jenny says. “Getting Mamma's stuff together is driving me crazy.”

“Have you been working on this all day?” I gesture toward the boxes stacked in the living room. The house is starting to look bare—Jenny has taken the pictures off the walls and the knick-knacks off the shelves and tables.

“No, I went into work this morning. I've only been here since two o'clock.”

“How much longer do you think it's going to take?”

“Another week at least. I keep getting sidetracked. I didn't know that Mamma used to write stories, and I keep finding them and then I stop to read them.” Her eyes suddenly fill with tears. “I hear her voice in the stories. I don't know why she never tried to get them published. She was really good.”

We talk a little longer, and when I get up to go, I say, “Did your mamma leave a will?”

Jenny looks surprised. “Samuel, I'm a lawyer. You actually think I'd let Mamma die without a will?”

“Some people won't listen to their kids,” I say. What I really want to know is whether her brother is in the will.

“Mamma had a lot of sense,” she says. “And she thought I was a good lawyer.”

“So I assume there's no problem with you being able to dispense with this place the way you see fit.”

Her eyes narrow. “Not a bit. Why would you think otherwise?”

“I don't want you to get all riled up, but I wondered if she left anything to your brother.”

“You've been hanging around your friend Loretta too much. You're going to turn into an old gossip. I believe I've made it clear that my brother is not a subject that's up for discussion.”

It's before five, so I stop at the Bobtail Police Department to take a look at the arrest record for Eddie Sandstone's assault charge. The record is straightforward: Eddie attacked a man at work in August of the year he graduated from high school—around the same time his daddy walked out on the family. Eddie was working for a builder and went after one of the men he was working with. The man had to have stitches after Eddie worked him over. There's no indication of what the altercation was about, only that the man eventually dropped the charges. I jot down his name, Otis Greevy.

The officer at the desk sends me back to Wallace Lyndall's office. Lyndall is getting ready to head home.

“Now what are you going to pull my chain about?” he says.

“The report about Howard Sandstone's disappearance mentioned that his son attacked a coworker. You remember it?” I show him the file.

He glances over it. “I remember it because I was new on the force. It didn't make any sense to me why Greevy didn't press charges. He had every right to. Eddie Sandstone hit him with a shovel and kicked him around before some fellows pulled him off. Was me, I would have had his hide.”

“So it never went to court?”

“No. But the Sandstone boy paid the price anyway. He was supposed to get a scholarship to SMU and they rescinded it once he got into trouble.”

Lyndall says Greevy still lives in town. “I don't know if he's retired or not. I don't remember how old he was, but he was several years older than Eddie Sandstone.”

We turn our attention back to the subject of the Borlands. I tell him I went back to their place and still found no sign of them.

“I called Jett Borland's girlfriend, and she said she wasn't seeing him anymore and didn't know where he was. But wherever he is, he's up to no good, that's for damn sure,” he says.

It's almost dark by the time I leave the Bobtail Police Department. I'm halfway home to Jarrett Creek when I see lights flashing and a few cars stopped by the side of the road. I slow down for a highway patrolman who is waving people past with a flashlight. There's a highway patrol car on the side of the road next to the wreck of an SUV that has run off into the ditch and is lying on its side. My windows are open, so I catch an acrid smell in the air, like something burning, though I don't see any flames. Another couple of cars are pulled off farther along the road, with people standing outside looking back at the accident.

I'm past the wreck when I realize that the car in the ditch looks like Jenny Sandstone's. I make a squealing U-turn and then another one to pull in behind the patrol cars. As I open the door to my truck, I hear a siren approaching from the direction of Bobtail.

A body is lying on the ground near the SUV with a patrolman crouched next to it. When I get closer, I see that it's Jenny, and for a moment my stomach clenches. But then I see that her eyes are open and the patrolman is talking to her.

“Jenny, what the hell happened?” I say.

Another patrolman steps into my path. “Sir, I need to ask you to step back.”

I identify myself, and he tells me his name is Bobby Cole. He pulls me aside. “She's hurt pretty bad, but she's able to talk. She says somebody tried to run her off the road.”

The burnt smell is stronger here. I glance over at the SUV and see a fire extinguisher lying on the ground. “Her car was on fire?” I say.

He grimaces. “She doesn't know how lucky she is. Somebody called in the wreck on their cell phone and we happened to be two minutes away. Flames were just starting up and we managed to get the fire out fast. Normally we would have left her in the car until the ambulance got here, but we figured there was a chance the fire might start back up. That's why we went ahead and pulled her out.”

I go over and crouch down on the other side from the patrolman who's tending to Jenny. She's got a goose egg–sized bump on her forehead, and her left arm is lying awkwardly across her torso. She's pale as death.

“You a friend?” the patrolman says.

“Yes.” I lean over and put my hand on her shoulder. “Jenny, it's me, Samuel. The patrolman said somebody tried to run you off the road. Did you see who it was?”

She clutches my hand and groans. “Big black car, that's all I know. Saw it coming up fast in my rearview mirror.” She shudders.

The ambulance comes blaring up and screeches to a halt. The siren dies with a moan. I hear the doors slam, and one of the drivers says, “Man, look at that car. Lucky it didn't roll over.”

Jenny is still talking. Her voice is low, and I have to bend close to hear her. “I thought he was going around me, but he hit me from the side. Hard.” She sighs and hums deep in her throat. “I saw that I was going off the road. I was scared if I tried to turn the wheel, I'd flip, so I steered toward the ditch.”

“Smartest thing she could have done,” the patrolman crouched across me says.

“Did you recognize the person who hit you?” I say.

“Didn't see the driver.”

“Everybody move aside,” one of the ambulance drivers says.

“No, I . . .” Jenny starts to say something.

“Ma'am, you need to stop talking. We're going to take care of you.”

“No!” she says. “Horses.”

“No need to put up a fuss,” I say, squeezing her hand. “I'm going to the hospital with you and I'll call Alvin.” And I'm going to talk to Zeke Dibble, too. I want him to go over to her place and check it out.

“I want to go home,” she says. Tears are slipping down the sides of her face.

“If everything is all right, they'll send you right home from the hospital,” I say, although it's clear that isn't going to happen.

I stand up so the EMTs can get her onto the stretcher. Another patrol car has arrived and two more patrolmen have gone up to talk to the people pulled onto the side of the road, to see if any of them saw the accident.

The patrolman who stayed by Jenny introduces himself as Arnold Mosier. Both he and Cole are in their thirties and could be mistaken for brothers. “We've called for a tow truck,” Mosier says. “I don't know what else we can do unless there are witnesses.”

I get a flashlight out of my truck and go over to look at the damage. There's a deep dent on the left rear bumper, but no scrapes along the side, so not likely to be any paint residue on the car that did this.

“Good thing she has an SUV,” Cole says. “Probably saved her life. If she was in a small car, she'd have been toast.”

Mosier is looking over at the SUV, frowning. “I don't understand why the airbag didn't deploy.”

Cole says, “She wouldn't have been hurt so bad if the bag had opened. She might have a lawsuit against the car manufacturer or the airbag company.”

All three of us stare at the wrecked vehicle. “Whoever did it is going to have a big dent in their fender,” I say.

“We'll alert all the body shops, although . . .” His voice trails away. I know as well as he does that there are plenty of places where somebody can get a dented bumper repaired or replaced without anybody being suspicious of where the dent came from—or caring. The highway patrol can't canvas every little two-bit town that has a service station with a garage on the side.

I shine my light into Jenny's car to see if I ought to get anything out. Her briefcase has slid to the door on the down side, and there's no way I can get to it. I ask Mosier and Cole to retrieve it for me when the car gets pulled out of the ditch.

I follow the ambulance to the hospital in Bobtail. On the way, I'm going over what Jenny told me. She said it was a dark car that hit her, and it doesn't sound random. My first thought is that the Borlands have upped their war on her. But then I remember that the car I saw her brother Eddie get into when he left the hospital was a black town car. I don't know why he'd want to force Jenny off the road, possibly killing her. But I do know there is big trouble between the two of them. I wish I could have gotten more out of Vera. It's time I found out more about Eddie.

CHAPTER 15

The next morning, when Loretta brings me a big hunk of coffee cake, she's excited about some news.

“Hold up,” I say. “Before you go off on a tangent, I need to tell you what happened last night.” I give her most of the details of Jenny's accident, leaving out the part about her being run off the road. “They had to do emergency surgery on her spleen, but they said she should be okay to get out in a couple of days.”

“I'll go over to the hospital right away.”

“Wait a little while,” I say. “I expect she's going to be sleeping late this morning.”

“I'm glad they took her to the hospital if she had a bump on her head. People get those hematomas. That's what happened to that poor actress.”

Until a few years ago, people got bumps on the head all the time without anybody getting all worked up over it. “She'll be okay,” I say, tamping down the little twinge of worry that starts up. “Now tell me your news.”

“You probably already know this, but for quite a while they've been planning to put up an outlet mall in Bobtail. Now they're finally going to do it.”

“I don't know what you'll want to buy there that you can't buy right here in Jarrett Creek,” I say.

“Samuel, you know good and well there's not a dress store here in town or anyplace to buy any kind of shoes.”

“They've got shoes at Palmer's,” I say, all innocent.

“I'm not even going to grace that with an answer.”

Palmer's is a general store that caters to hunters and fishermen. They sell waders and hiking boots and moccasins. “I guess you know more about shopping than I do.”

She looks at me with a critical eye. “No argument there. In fact, by the time the mall gets built, those pants of yours are going to be so worn out, you're going to need to go over there and get some new ones or risk giving people a show.”

“I've got plenty of pants,” I say. “But I happen to like these. They're comfortable. And I can get anything I want here in town. Where's this new shopping center going to be?”

“Out west of town. They're tearing down a subdivision to make room for it. Bobtail Ridge. Can you believe they're going to call the shopping center that, too?”

“What's wrong with that?”

“Ridge? The whole town of Bobtail is flat as a pancake. Not a ridge in sight. Some of the names they give those subdivisions are ridiculous. There ought to be a truth-in-naming law. There's one called Rio Linda over in San Antonio. It's as far from the river as you can get.”

“They're tearing down a whole subdivision to build the shopping center? Seems like there'd be plenty of places to build it without tearing something down.”

“You have to take that up with the city council. Somebody said the subdivision was rundown, but I don't know if that's why they chose that site. I don't care where they build it, as long as they build it.”